Day Two - Let's Get Organized

Hello again.  Day Two.  Still here.  Let's get to work!

I promised in my last post to talk a little bit about how I am trying to organize things, so let me briefly share with you my "Domestic Engineer Organizational Techniques version 0.1".  I am pretty certain that if it were software it would be still in the "early development stages", but hell, you have to start somewhere, right?

I have always worked well in my professional career by taking good notes, and carrying around a well used lab journal with me.  I would jot down results from experiments or tests in it, as well as short hand notes for commands or instructions I needed to remember.  Yes - these are often things that would later be entered into a test case in JIRA somewhere, but they always seemed to start out in a lab journal at some point.  Perhaps its because I got used to taking notes on paper when I was studying Linguistics at UCSC - who knows, I just know it works for me.  So, thats what I went with initially.

My favorite lab journals are Moleskine Folio Professional Notebooks.  They are large format, nice paper notebooks that are absolutely overkill for what I am using them for.  In short, I love them.  I like to take my notes with a drafting pencil as well, which is, once again, superfluous, but it makes me feel more "engineery", and I love the thing, so why not.

I plan on using this book for the following:

• Sprint Planning:  That's right.  The poor man's JIRA board.  Also does not require power or a dedicated IT team.  Also not scalible for large Enterprises.  Meh.
• "Bucket" Tracking:  AKA - Epics.  I have defined five different categories of tasks I plan on doing every week.  Each category is it's own "bucket", which I then poor tasks into, pulling one out a week for my Sprint.  These map (roughly) to the Epics you would encounter in Agile.
• Work Journal:  If I need space to keep notes for a particular project, say, replumbing the kitchen sink or building a new planter box, this jornal is the perfect place to keep those notes.
• Home Improvement Master Task List:  On New Year's Day, every year (okay okay, this is the first year, but it is the start of a new tradition, I swear!) my wife and I walk around the house and inventory everything that needs to be done to the house room by room.  This can range from small repair, to epic remodel.  No matter what it is, we write it down on the list.

My journal is just getting off the ground, but I have the basic sections laid out already.  I transferred the Home Improvement Master Task List first thing, and plan on using that as my "Home Improvement" Bucket moving forward.

Tomorrow I will get into my thoughts around my "Bucket" system, go over the categories I am initially starting with, as well as how I envision them relating to Epics in Agile.  My goal is to keep these blog posts relatively short, both so I have an improved chance of actually doing them every day, as well as making them more digestible to read.  Nobody wants a wall of text.

Ta ta for now!

Day 1 - So You've Quit Your Job - Now What?

Hello all,

I have created this Blog to chronicle my experiences at transforming my life.  Sounds hokey when I put it that way, but honestly that is what's really going on.  Change is hard, especially the change you know you've always wanted to make in your life, but have been afraid to do.  I mean, who in their right mind would quit their high paying tech job to stay at home and take care of the kids, right?

Well, I would, for one.  I also hope to actually get my writing career off the ground and do some narration work.  You know, do the stuff I have been telling myself since I was a kid would go out into the world and do, and just somehow lost track of along the way of figuring out how to support a family, pay the bills and be a good dad.

This was not a decision that was arrived at lightly.  My partner and I talked about it for months ahead of time (although really we had been discussing a move like this for much longer than that).  We somehow found ourselves in the position where we had two full time careers that we were both commuting for.  Our kids were a thing in the back of our minds that we would see when we got done driving over the hill at the end of the day.  In other words, the new societal norm for our day and age.  And it just wasn't working.  Sure, we had money, but we had no time, no connection, and no real parenting going on.  We would pay other people to clean and work on a house we had no time to spend in ourselves.  We would pay other people to drive our kids around, take them to the important things in life which we could not be present for.  So, yeah, we wanted to change that.

So, why Domestic Engineering?  In short, because I have been working as an Engineer in some capacity for most of my professional life, and it seems like a lot of the same practices can apply to running a family and pursuing your creative pursuits.  In specific, I fell in love with the principals behind Agile Testing methodology while I was working at Lab126 for Amazon.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, or just wanting a refresher, you can read the Agile Manifesto for more information.  In short, I wanted to take the Scrum and Scum Mastering to the household.  My wife loved the idea!

Anyone familiar with Agile understands that no two "Agile" teams look the same, or can even agree on the specifics of the development process, but there are some major themes that unify the concept.  From those I decided to take the basics that worked for me, and incorporate them into my life.  These were, roughly, as follows:

• Sprint Planning:  A Sprint is an arbitrary length of time where you set goals, assign tasks, and track your progress.  It is typically from one week to a month long.  I have decided to start with a two week Sprint initially.  My "Management Team" consists of my wife and I, so right now its really only the two of us sitting down and planning things out, but it could easily grow to include housemates/grandparents/etc.
• Sprint Retrospectives:  At the of the Sprint we will go through our progress and success and see where we are, talk about what worked, what didn't, and why.  The goal here is not to assign blame, but to figure out how to improve the process and allow for more effective Sprints in the future.  
• Daily Stand-Ups:  At the beginning of the day, the team (that would be my wife and I and our two daughters) will discuss what are the goals of the day, what progress we have made since yesterday, and if we have any Blockers.  Sounds a little hokey, I know, but reinforcing in everyone's mind what they are going to do for that day before we all separate to the four corners of the world really helps IMHO.  I plan on doing this at breakfast.  

I am not using a JIRA board at present for the household.  I have considered it, but I am worried that the overhead of managing that whole system won't make the investment of time and energy worthwhile.  So, for now, I am using a classic lab journal to track my activities and Sprints.  I  will get more into that, and my schemas for organizing the household and its work in a later post.

Looks like its time for me to run errands, visit the doctor and go grocery shopping, so I will post again tomorrow, where I hope to cover some of the organizational techniques I am trying to employ.  I will also probably speak some to the terror I am facing at worrying about if I am doing the "right thing".  

Talk soon.